Manchester City's FFP victory ignores wider criticism

Amid a flurry of new, rich semi-state owners taking over clubs in the first decade of the new millennium, something had to be done. For the existing, traditionally big clubs, there had to be a form of gatekeeping to ensure that their positions of dominance could be maintained. Ensuring their own position and wealth was their priority, and they had sufficient influence for UEFA to introduce Financial Fair Play regulations for the 2011/12 season.

Luckily for said clubs, there was a fig leaf to hide behind. As smaller clubs ran into financial difficulty, there were calls for protection and regulations to keep them from going under. The collapse of Setanta and the weighting of cash to the very top of the football world had led to too many speculative efforts. The prize at the end of the football pyramid was too compelling to turn down. Once you were in the Premier League, you were rich. Then you could tilt at the top. Whether it was a risk worth taking was a question asked too rarely.

Now, the sensible reaction might be to consider that spitting wealth so unevenly invited such gambles. Weighting riches towards so few places meant that it made some kind of sense to spend big and to hope that you could establish yourself in a position where prize money and broadcast revenue became a self-fulfilling loop. Tens of millions in income would allow for huge transfers and larger salary expenditure, and that would allow clubs in the money to pull the ladder up behind them.

Instead of sharing the rewards from the Champions League and Premier League more equitably, instead the reaction was to instigate new rules. The intention was to prevent outside cash injections being enough to steal a march on your rivals. Instead, expenditure had to tally with more traditional revenue sources. There was a logic to it, but there was also injustice.

Why, if you were owned by someone with almost limitless money, should they be prevented from indulging and supporting their club? It would have been fairer, in retrospect and at the time, to simply put in different protections. Owners could have been prevented from loaning money to their clubs so that they could not pull the rug when they lost interest. They could have perhaps been compelled to commit to long-term spending and infrastructure improvements instead of being cut off almost completely.

Separately, the case that UEFA brought to the Court of Arbitration for Sport looked strong. How much opinion is swayed because of Football Leaks though is unclear. Legal or quasi-legal appeals can often succeed or fail on narrow points of order rather than the inherent right or wrong of a case. And realistically, the appeal will have changed nobody’s opinion of Manchester City’s financial operations. At the very least though, they appear to have bent the rules close to snapping point, and they do not appear to have done so by accident. Whatever, the case has been heard and the penalty trimmed to the point the club will treat it as a victory.

The victory, though, misses the point. As Amnesty International and other journalists over the last decade have pointed out, Mansour bin Zayed Al Nahyan is part of a royal family that is tarnished with accusations of serious human rights abuse. Regardless of your thoughts about the merits of FFP, those more serious accusations needed to be more credibly examined before their ownership was waved through. Diversity and inclusion initiatives on City's social media accounts do not make up for this.

The Premier League, UEFA, the British government and most Manchester City fans don’t seem to care about this. Most other fans - see Manchester United and Newcastle United fans hoping for their own despotic saviour - wouldn’t care beyond their own transfer budget either. Unless there is serious reform of ownership rules this will continue to happen, and this is what matters above all elsewhere football is concerned.

Sportswashing is a symptom of poor governance across the world, and until that fundamentally changes then this laundering of reputation will endure.